Ventura 13.2 File Sharing broken

Just to share what helped for me:

Symptom:

• No connection, always the "Beachball", no backups possible

Setup:

• Use Mini M1 as a server (with several external NVMe disks shared)
• Connection with several MBPs (all M1) - Use Carbon Copy Cloner for automated Backups
• All Ventura 13.2

First I tried to fix it with the solutions mentioned here

• Stop - reboot - start file sharing of M1 Server again -> not solved
• Eliminating custom icon on top-level -> not solved
• Tried to renew connection to the server via SMB://10.... (Server IP) -> not solved

Finally I remembered that I also have a Raspberry pi 4 which is connected via CIFS to the Mac mini (also for backing up files)

Then I tried to connect my MacBookPro with CIFS instead of SMB - I entered cifs://10..... (Server IP).

E voila since then it was possible to reconnect to the MacMini Server. I reconnected all laptops using cifs:// and the connection is up and running - I know cifs is more or less an outdated dialect of SMB - but hey, who cares. I was able to backup 45GB file via (Gigabit LAN) within 9 minutes, so performance seems OK.

Until then the system is up and running (since Sun., 5th) Don't know if "CIFS" was the key (or a combination of everything I tried), but it seems that this solves currently my situation until Apple will come up with an official solution.

I will observe it and give an update if something changes

Br

-T